Good morning everybody,
Here is a short clip of my session with Blaine a few days ago.
Blaine and his parents came to see me because they were having problems with Recall.
Soon we understood that the problem was not really “recall” but the over-excitement Blaine showed in the presence of tennis balls and that was creating issues in other areas.
We implemented different exercises to improve this and on this video, you can watch one of the exercises where we are working with several tennis balls, picking one after another, delivering them to Blaine, either to his mouth or to the ground, and sometimes throwing it a bit further.
The main goal of our training process will be to improve calm behaviour in the presence of tennis balls, develop exchanges on cue, lower arousal during play and ability to wait for playtime.
You can watch how excited Blaine gets when is dad picks one ball, because in his brain he still associates it with intense fetch games. Although, this past history and behaviours are what is creating issues in other areas like “Recall”.
Blaine would get over-excited with the balls, his arousal would go up, his ability to respond would lower and keeping the ball for himself would avoid losing it, which would make him not come back to his parents on a walk. This is a short explanation of what is going on with Blaine.
Feel free to ask anything, I will happily reply.
Thank you,
Dog Behaviourist Ricardo Ministro
connectedbehaviourcom.wordpress.com 